4 Stars
This historical novel is part romance and part mystery narrated by an older, wiser narrator detailing events that led to his increasing self-awareness 40 years earlier.
In 1915, 22-year-old Paul Gascoyne, after sabotaging an academic career, becomes an English literature tutor to patients at a tuberculosis sanitarium in the Adirondacks of upper New York State. There he meets Sarah Ballard, a young woman who survived the Lusitania disaster. To rouse her out of her gloom, Paul encourages her to write a memoir. It eventually becomes clear that her memoir is a mix of fact and fiction. Then when her health deteriorates and death is not unlikely, Sarah begs Paul to be the one person in the world who will truly know her and she reveals secrets she has told only one other person. But is she a reliable narrator of her life story?
There is also a romance story. Paul falls in love with the beautiful, enigmatic Sarah, but she is in love with Jasper Keene, a promising playwright, who is also in love with her. The three are friends, but when Jasper disappears for extended periods without explanation, Sarah turns to Paul. She often places him in the difficult position of assisting her relationship with Jasper. Will Paul be able to put Sarah’s happiness ahead of his personal desires?
It is the characterization of Paul which stood out for me. As a man in his sixties, Paul describes his younger self very aptly: a “callow, pompous, and self-involved” young man who needs to learn that “he may misjudge people and get things wrong even when – especially when – he is most confident he is right.” When he first arrives in Saranac Lake, it takes him a while to escape “his personal ivory tower . . . moated with prejudice” and leave behind his “juvenile resentment at the injustice of my exile.” His life has been privileged and not particularly difficult until his fiancée jilts him and then he throws away a job as a university lecturer because he isn’t given what he wants. He seems very much a spoiled, entitled young man.
It is Paul’s attitude to women that I found particularly distasteful. He decides that his mission for the next few years will be to become “’a thoroughgoing cad . . . a heartbreaker of the first order. I’m going to enjoy as much female affection as possible while limiting my own emotional engagement to lofty amusement.’” He wants to rid himself of “the tiresome burden of virginity” and so attempts to seduce women without any concern for their feelings or reputations. Totally oblivious to the double standard, he then believes that he could never “fall in love with anyone who was not a virgin.” He has a lot to learn about love and the lessons are painful, as he realizes only later.
These views about love cause him a lot of difficulty; full of self-importance, he doesn't like his beliefs challenged. For the longest time, he will not allow himself to believe what Sarah tells him about her life. She admonishes him, “’What I may have been to you I don’t know – a Madonna? A Juliet attached to the wrong Romeo? I make a bad Juliet. But for some reason – some reason that has nothing to do with who or what I actually am – you’ve chosen to idealize me.’” He is very much a doubting Thomas with “an innate preference for comfortable ignorance.”
I loved the writing style. I enjoy diction which uses words like farceur, Panglossian, gracile, and seraglio. Literary allusions abound: reference is made to Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, Stephen Crane, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and, of course, Shakespeare. And the title is perfect. Given the fate of Sarah and Jasper, that title provides food for thought.
Giles Blunt may be best known for his John Cardinal detective series, but this literary fiction is definitely worthy of attention too.
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